


Maddy and Scott and the Neverending Honeymoon

by TransWonderWoman



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:27:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28428543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TransWonderWoman/pseuds/TransWonderWoman
Summary: Set during the days and weeks after Nathan Christopher Pryor-Summers was born, chronicling Maddy's feelings.
Relationships: Madelyne Pryor/Scott Summers
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10
Collections: X-Plain the X-Men X-change Winter 2020-21





	Maddy and Scott and the Neverending Honeymoon

**Author's Note:**

> Betad by notwhelmedyet, and a gift for ARoseForMedusa. i hope that this is acceptable to you, i wrote it all in 2 hours and then spent days making minor tweaks. i hope you like it.
> 
> Also remember folks, comments would be greatly appreciated.

Madelyne Pryor had a good life. Which wasn’t to say that she was unjustified in losing her mind, just a little. 

Nathan Christopher was a nightmare of a child, screaming at all hours one day and shockingly quiet and brooding the next, as if somehow channeling Scott’s angst and her temper in alternating allotments.

Which was in no way helped by Scott’s infuriating patience for their child. No matter what the child did, no matter how he behaved; when he screamed or woke them or his terrifying silences that sent horrible thoughts of SIDS shooting through Maddy’s head, Scott was calm and loving and infuriatingly pleased. His eyes—perpetually hidden but a smile constantly tugging at the corners of his mouth—the way he softened even thinking about the child. 

Well, it would be infuriating if it didn’t also make Maddy’s heart melt a little, for her love, for how desperately he wanted a family, for how completely devoted he was. Even in his darker moods, an ear-splitting shriek from the little demon spawn brought him into the present, a sense of peace washing over him. 

It wasn’t fair. Here she was, in the throes of some sort of postpartum psychosis and he was rejuvenated by everything that drove her crazy. She’d wring his neck if she didn’t feel so in love, if he wasn’t being the best father and husband he could be. But still; how dare he not suffer.

-

Time passed, and the crazy hormones lessened slightly, only for her mind to focus on a new issue, that being the angry red stretch marks across her belly, shouting at her for daring to have a baby. Maddy would find herself staring at herself in the mirror, looking at her body, angry at herself for being angry about her body. For being upset that she had, of all things, put on weight during pregnancy, and then her body hadn’t instantly snapped back to instant perfection.

Scott, of course, was no help. When she voiced her frustration, he just wrapped her in a hug and called her perfect which was... gross and useless. He’d begun buying increasingly comfortable knit sweaters for her, in all sorts of sizes, all sorts of fits, not because he didn’t know her size, he answered under interrogation. But because he knew how it felt to have a changing body, and to want to dress it differently in different moments, on different days. He said this so slowly, as if unearthing some half forgotten vault from the recesses of an abandoned building, which... she supposed must be how Scott understood himself to be. A vast empty building full of collapsed hallways and locked doors.

So of course, curse him, his sweet if somewhat idiosyncratic gesture won her over, and she found herself cuddling alternately in form fitting and roomy sweaters beside him. Resting with little baby Christopher napping between the two of them. 

In moments like these, Maddy could feel herself being filled with enough joy that it threatened to snuff out the fire inside. It almost scared her, how essential Scott felt to her, how it felt like she would fall apart without him and their little home. 

-

Baby Nathan Christopher Charles Pryor-Summers was a demon, and he had to be stopped. His teeth were still a far off dream of his, but he put enough force into his bites that he had left angry welts on sensitive areas of Maddy’s body. Of course, Maddy could scarcely do anything in response to this clear attack on her body aside from pump and bottle feed him exclusively as she healed. Which he strenuously objected to, except for when Scott did the honors, another infuriating weapon in Scott’s invisible war on her sanity. 

He laughed when she mentioned to him that she didn’t appreciate his attacks on her, the bastard. She was being perfectly rational, his equanimity in the face of unmitigated horror had to count as some sort of psyop, and she demanded to know why they were at war. She couldn’t strike back unless she understood the stakes, unless it was some heretofore unmentioned and unknown sadism of Scott’s. But that didn’t track with… other aspects of his personality. 

So Maddy was stuck with an impossible problem of a demonic child and a husband who didn’t know when to stop being so fucking pleased with their son. Honestly, it was a disaster.

Not that she felt too bad about it, when at the end of the day she would find herself curled up in bed with two loving heaters, keeping away the awful Alaskan cold. 

-

Maddy lived in fear of Scott’s previous life invading their carefully constructed happiness. Or not fear, a sort of possessive preemptive fury. How dare this hypothetical future potentially exist, robbing her of her imagined husband and blissful home life. She woke from sleep with her fingers clawlike, grasping Scott’s hair and shoulders, holding him close, making sure he could never be taken away. 

He assured her that he wasn’t going anywhere. Repeatedly. That he had everything he ever wanted. But still she imagined a world in which something broke, the gods went to war with one another, and he somehow found himself elsewhere, regardless of his intentions or desires. She imagined a world in which the gods tore them apart for their amusement, and drove them to fight and hurt and die for no reason but grand cosmic tragedy. 

She imagined these futures and gasped, heart full of rage at these impossible forces, beings that would force her to become something worse, that would make her husband miserable, would rob their son of a happy life with loving parents. 

But every day she woke and that dreaded day did not appear. She and Scott and baby Nathan Christopher worked out a routine as they slowly put together a life. Work schedules were planned, because Scott had never heard of a situation that shouldn’t be planned for months in advance. College funds were set up, again because Scott was pathological.

Maddy finally got in contact with a therapist because—as Scott gently suggested one night—being angry and scared and sad was probably exhausting her, even if he did personally find her rage endlessly charming, her antagonism towards their sweetheart of a child a quirk that while fine for now, should probably be talked about before he grew up and she gave him a complex. 

And one day, Scott got the call. And something deep inside Maddy begged and prayed that this wasn’t the culmination of her worst fears, that Scott wasn’t going to vanish on them. And this time, in this world, the gods answered.

“Sorry, I’m retired.” 

Scott came back, his shoulders heavy but set with purpose. He sat beside Maddy and held her close, kissing her and burying his face in her shoulder. She didn’t ask what was going on, she knew he would tell her when he could. But she did silently thank whatever and whoever loved her that this time, there would be no disaster, no fall into the depths of an inferno, that the fire inside wasn’t just anger, it was fierce protective love. That she wasn’t a slow motion tragedy, but a joy. In this world they were safe and happy and loved, and everything would go as planned.


End file.
